"Who the hell is James Webb?" you might ask. Well, he was a lawyer and a bureaucrat. He happened to be the top administrator of NASA through the glory years of Gemini and Apollo, but he was not a scientist.

Is anyone else offended by having a piece of advanced technology named after a bureaucrat? I'm fine with putting his name on a government building, but I think the next generation space telescope should be named after a scientist - perhaps Carl Sagan.

It does not seem that we are at the stage of a signature collection, but I would be willing sign the petition, when it appears. Actually I would be willing to consider a petition to fund a Mars habitat project, or asteroid mining. I would rather listen to a space, heavy breathing scandal any day.

For all you space freaks out there the latest issue (Dec) of the Smithsonian mag has an interesting article on the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk. It is astounding what this South African has accomplished thus far! And he does it on a shoestring budget that makes the US government and NASA look extremely inefficient when it comes to getting metal into space .

Einstein and others considered (quantum entanglement) to be impossible, as it violated the local realist view of causality (Einstein referring to it as "spooky action at a distance")[4] and argued that the accepted formulation of quantum mechanics must therefore be incomplete.

That's arguing the way the creationists do, referring to initial impressions or quotes, and ignoring later changes and discoveries.

In his later years, a different Einstein emerged. The mainstream of physics followed the course of the quantum theory of the mid 1920's. Einstein recognized that this new quantum theory enjoyed remarkable empirical successes, so that it clearly had something very right. However he did not believe that future fundamental physics should be to build upon it. Rather he thought the way ahead was to develop the geometrical approach of general relativity into an all encompassing "unified field theory" within which the results of the new quantum theory would be derived. While he had contributed to its development, Einstein became the most prominent critic of the new quantum theory. (source)